Online report of the Progressive Review. For 54 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

June 9, 2017

In Kansas, even Republicans revolted against tax breaks for the rich

Share Blue - The state of Kansas is in economic shambles, and no one did more to make that happen than Gov. Sam Brownback. So much so that his own party has now turned on him.

After Brownback vetoed a bill to raise taxes by $1.2 billion, a bipartisan group of state legislators, including Republican House Speaker Ron Ryckman, voted to override the veto.

The fact even Republicans got behind raising taxes in Kansas is a testament to how horribly Brownback has mismanaged the state budget.

When Brownback cut taxes in 2012, it was all supposed to be so simple. With the support of strong GOP majorities in the legislature and former Reagan economic adviser Art Laffer, Brownback signed a sweeping package of trickle-down economics.

Income taxes were slashed across the board, the top bracket was eliminated, and tens of thousands of businesses — including subsidiaries of Koch Industries — got a “small business exemption” from corporate taxes.

Brownback promised the cuts would generate so much growth they would pay for themselves. He proclaimed it would be “like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.”

That is not what happened.

Instead, economic growth flatlined, state revenues plunged by over $600 million per year, and the state credit rating was downgraded three times.

Desperate to balance the budget, Kansas lawmakers passed nine consecutive budget cuts and raided the state highway fund. They also imposed massive, racially discriminatory cuts on public schools, which the state supreme court ruled unconstitutional. Even before that, teachers were fleeing the state in record numbers.

Kansas voters are fed up. Brownback is now one of the least popular governors in America, and last November, dozens of pro-Brownback state legislators lost their seats to Democrats and moderate Republicans — a clear mandate to undo the mess Brownback created.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for nearly 50 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care